Pope Benedict XVI on Monday named Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan, who has led the archdiocese of Milwaukee for the last seven years, to succeed Cardinal Edward M. Egan as the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York.

The Cathedral of St. Patrick Young Adults and the Archdiocese of New York have announced a “24 Hours of Confession” program to make the Sacrament available round-the-clock in Manhattan from March 6 to March 7.

Global recognition will be conferred this year on a missionary who figures in Hawaii's history because of his service to people banished to Kalaupapa during the 19th-century leprosy epidemic. Father Damien De Veuster will be named a saint by the Catholic Church in an Oct. 11 ceremony in Rome. It will come as a finale in a process of ecclesiastical scrutiny that began more than 60 years ago.

As written, the Pope's statement has the potential, at least theoretically, to empty the U.S. Supreme Court of all five of its Catholic jurists and perhaps all other Catholics who sit on the bench in the lower federal and state courts.

Austria's Catholic Church will hold a crisis session on Monday to discuss an uproar over a new provincial bishop and the Vatican's readmission of a banned bishop who denies the Holocaust, officials said on Friday.

The rehabilitated bishop at the heart of a Vatican uproar for denying the Holocaust has been dismissed as the head of an Argentine seminary. The seminary announced the dismissal on Sunday in a statement that said the bishop, Richard Williamson was no longer the director of the La Reja seminary on the outskirts of the Argentina capital.

In recent months, dioceses around the world have been offering Catholics a spiritual benefit that fell out of favor decades ago — the indulgence, a sort of amnesty from punishment in the afterlife — and reminding them of the church’s clout in mitigating the wages of sin.

Ever since April 2007, when Cardinal Edward M. Egan turned 75 and sent the pope a letter offering to retire as Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, speculation has raged over which prelate will be named to succeed him. Catholics in Rome and the United States who track movements in the hierarchy say the Vatican is close to announcing who will claim what may be the most high-profile bishop’s seat in the American church.